


set your old heart free

by inkedinserendipity



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, [jonah voice] martin has gorgeous eyes, also briefly featuring wing!jon, also feat basira/daisy and what the gfs but i won't maintag those, be a shame if something were to...happen to them, this is v much a jonmartin fic :3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25834927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkedinserendipity/pseuds/inkedinserendipity
Summary: “Jon?”“Martin!” Jon turns, relief shuddering through him, and finds Martin stood next to the throne. He steps forward, but Martin stays where he is. “Where did you go? What happened? I just looked back and you were gone!”Martin shrugs, one-shouldered, and smiles. It stretches oddly on his face. Like a mask. “I went exploring,” he says, in a voice that isn’t quite right. Jon’s frantic steps slow. “I’ve always been curious.”His eyes are blue.Jon freezes. Martin’s eyes are blue. Bright, cold, ice-chipped sapphire blue.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 15
Kudos: 214





	set your old heart free

**Author's Note:**

> When will I write a summary that isn't just a snippet of the fic itself? Never, probably. You guessed it: Magnus body-hops to our beloved Blackwood. 
> 
> [TV show summary voice] Can Jon defeat Jonah Magnus and get his beloved back? Find out below!

“He’s not here,” Jon breathes, looking incredulously around the Panopticon. For _months_ they’ve traveled—at least as well as he can figure in this changed world—only to find Magnus, the _coward_ , left his throne empty. Jon approaches it, eyes narrowed, and curses at the plush unblemished velvet. Damn him, there’s a little golden crown sat artfully askance at the edge of the crest rail. A single sapphire sits in the middle like a cold blue eye. “Damn it!”

His voice echoes around the chamber. Jon grits his teeth, hands balled into fists. In response to his incredulous rage, his _fury_ , eyes pop out all over his skin like boils, all narrowed and hateful, for all the good it does him in the Panopticon. Here, he can’t see through them. It doesn’t matter. Magnus isn’t here.

Jon sighs. “Let’s keep looking,” he says. “Maybe we’ll find something in the—Martin?”

He looks around. The room is empty. Martin had just been— _“Martin?”_

No response. The single word, the call, echoes quiet and ominous through the room.

Fear ricochets through him. He takes two quick steps forward, looking around as though Martin would just be sat against the wall, leaned against the door, but there’s no sign of him. “Martin!”

The vast emptiness of the room presses in on him, and Jon shakes it away angrily. Yes, this is the epicenter of all the fears, but the Vast and the Lonely have already gnawed their marks into him and Jon has no intention of letting them take a second bite. Maybe Martin’s gone down to the Archives. Yes, he’d always rather wanted to continue the work he began just before the Unknowing. Maybe he means to set the whole damn place on fire.

Jon sets off for the long, toiling stairwell that coils up to the top of the Eye’s Tower. They’ve been separated before, but they’ve always found each other. There’s no sign of Magnus, so this is Jon’s domain now, and no harm can come to Martin here. Few things would dare cross this world’s Archive.

And then:

“Jon?”

“Martin!” Jon turns, relief shuddering through him, and finds Martin stood next to the throne. He steps forward, but Martin stays where he is. “Where did you go? What happened? I just looked back and you were gone!”

Martin shrugs, one-shouldered, and smiles. It stretches oddly on his face. Like a mask. “I went exploring,” he says, in a voice that isn’t quite right. Jon’s frantic steps slow. “I’ve always been curious.”

His eyes are blue.

Jon freezes. Martin’s eyes are blue. Bright, cold, ice-chipped sapphire blue.

As he watches, a smile curls across Martin’s face, sinuous and slow.

“No.”

“Oh, yes.”

“No,” Jon breathes, voice cracked. “No, you—no!”

Martin tilts his head, expression turned simpering, sickeningly sympathetic. “What’s wrong, Jon?”

“Give him back,” Jon demands, vicious and aching. He steps forward, viper-quick, raises his chin to glare deep into eyes that _aren_ _’t Martin’s_. “Give him back! You can’t have him!”

“Oh, Jon,” Jonah Magnus says, cloyingly sweet, “I already do.”

Jon shakes his head. “No,” he says, fighting to keep his composure, to keep his eyes inside his skin, to keep the static that crackles just beneath his skin in check. No. _No_. “Get out.”

Magnus laughs. “I’m afraid it’s permanent, Jon.” His head tilts. “You really should take better care of your things.”

“Martin can take care of himself.”

Magnus hums. “Maybe before, but here? He was so trusting, Jon. You told him this was your domain, and he was so comfortable. He dropped his guard.” The sweet expression sours into a smirk. “What was it you said, about this world you have made? You cannot trust comfort.”

Magnus had _heard him_. An anger so powerful it feels unreal shivers through him, and he no longer _cares_ , no longer bothers to struggle as eyes sprout along his skin, wide and staring. When his jaw aches he realizes he’s snarling. Magnus just chuckles, unconcerned, and sits, languid, on his throne. Martin’s fingers look delicate as he picks the crown off the inlaid wood and spins it, considering, in his hands. “You’d done so well, too. Both of you. His performance in the Lonely? Stirring.”

“Shut up.”

“Why? What are you going to do, Jon? Beat me to death? No.” Magnus crosses his legs, crosses _Martin_ _’s_ legs, and settles the crown gently on hair that Jon has run his fingers through countless times, as _comfort_ , for Martin and for him as they’d grieved the changed world and it _sickens_ him to know that Magnus watched that, too. As though he knows what Jon’s thinking, Magnus smiles, and adjusts the crown on his head. “It’s ornamental, really, and probably too gaudy for your tastes. Martin certainly would’ve hated it,” Magnus says, and Jon sees red, but what can he _do?_ What can he do? If he has any chance, if he has _any_ chance of getting Martin back then he—then he can’t— “I do love it though.”

_“Shut up.”_

“It’s inspiring, really,” Magnus says, voice almost gentle. “How far you two made it, before you reached the end.”

The rage boils up and over and Jon reaches out, _tears_ into him as he has so many, searching for weaknesses and points to grip, to rend, to _destroy_ , but the Eye is a ward around Magnus and all his anger collapses like cloth against a barricade, finding no purchase. He tries again, searching, desperate, for _anything_ Magnus might know that Jon could use, he’s been stealing bodies for so long and he must know _something_ about regret or recrimination, and if not him then Rayner, anything that could bring Martin back, but his mind is impervious and faintly when Jon staggers back, drained and head aching, he hears Magnus laughing.

“This may be your domain, my beautiful Archive,” Magnus says, almost fond, and Jon wants to be _sick_ , he wants, he _wants_ to be overwhelmingly furious and powerful but all of his despair and anger cannot make a dent against a mind a hundred years older than Jon’s. “But it was mine long before you were born. You have no power here.”

No. _No_. Jon refuses to accept that. He refuses. He will not let Magnus win. _He will not let Magnus take him_.

Jon takes a deep breath, pushing down his fury and despair and shoving it away, down where all the other dark and broken parts of him lay scattered, and decides, then, that if he dies in this attempt it will be a mercy; but he will _not_ , because he will not fail, because he _is_ this ruined world and he will not accept anything less. “This may be your Institute,” Jon grits, his whole body shivering, eyes sprouting along the backs of his hands, his shoulders, along his back, and something great and awful unfurls from his shoulderblades as he growls in a voice that is not his own, _“but the ruined world is mine.”_

And then he _digs_.

Because Magnus may be hundreds of years old but Jon knows the agony of _millions_ , and he detaches himself from the frail flesh form of the Archivist, bereft and grieving, and becomes _more_. His feet leave the ground and he feels his body pulse, shaking apart, and he reaches out to every single person still living and aching and breaking in the world that he destroyed and summons it: their fear, their terror, the love that this world twisted and made rotten, and _shoves_.

It batters and pours against Magnus’s wall, and from far, far away Jon watches Magnus’s eyes—those eyes that he hates like nothing else—go wide. With fear, or surprise, perhaps? It doesn’t matter either way, because in one moment Jon and all the forces of fear he has wrought slam against a warded mind and the next they spill through. The Archivist’s frail body shakes and splits with veins too delicate and thin to maintain that much weight, and Jon leans into it, leans into the fear and terror and _love_ , spoilt and rotten though he made it, and shoves it into Magnus’s mind, and watches, detached and crumpling, as Magnus’s mind strains and fights and breaks, blood rocketing to his eyes and spilling out as they finally, finally, _finally_ go dark.

Jon drops to the ground.

His vision fringes. Blackness encroaches, and there is not a part of him that does not want to twist and die with agony, but he pulls himself to his elbows, to his knees, and crawls over to Martin—to _Martin—_

Blood trickles down Martin’s face. He lays unmoving, save for the faint breath of wind that trickles around the ruined top layer of the Panopticon. Jon crumbles, landing hard on his side, and reaches out to cup a cheek stained crimson in a cooling pool of blood. He tries to whisper, to speak, just one word, just _one_ , but his voice catches and breaks. He shifts, and along his back something twinges and he winces, then laughs, at that one hurt temporarily overruling all the others when none of them _matter_. Jon forces himself to peer closer, a trembling hand lifted to brush the hair from Martin’s face.

His eyes are closed. Aside from the teartracks of red staining down his face, he could be asleep.

Jon chokes on a laugh. His vision grays, and Jon traces his own bloodied hand across Martin’s other cheek, brushing the hair along his ear, and curls a sob into his chest.

All across his body, eyes blink and sway, overtaking his skin entirely, not just atop him but within him, bitten into every inch of his flesh. The hand he rests against Martin’s chest, knuckles curled against his heart, blinks tiredly back at him.

Jon swallows, feels the river-smooth-pebble twine of his throat, the pull of air through dimpled lungs. His tongue is pockmarked flesh. He breathes out: just one word. A name, or maybe a hopeless prayer. It should have sounded so, so sweet.

Jon closes his eyes.

* * *

He aches.

He sucks in a breath in a rush and winces, the air cool and harsh against his throat. He tries to open his eyes—he can’t remember why he should be surprised that he woke up at all—and fails. Something has gummed them closed, and Jon gives up quickly on trying to open them.

Martin.

God, _Martin_.

Jon slumps back to the floor. He remembers, now, why he hadn’t thought he was surprised. He remembers the ruining of the world, and then Magnus, and Martin….

Then: “Jon?”

That’s…he knows that voice. Jon wrenches his eyes open, and meets a familiar face, heavily scarred and framed with a jagged crop. “Hey,” she says.

He tries a smile and thinks he succeeds. Strange: his cheeks no longer feel like river-rocks. He tries to lift a hand and grimaces, giving up. “Daisy.”

“Eyes are gone,” she says, and shifts to sit more comfortably next to him. Jon looks around himself, and is stunned to realize he only has two eyes. He tries to sit up and retches, pain spearing through his chest, and she pushes him back down with a wry snort. “Said your eyes were gone, Sims. Stop trying to look around.”

“Where—?”

“Panopticon,” she grunts. Her arms are folded over top her knees. “Been here awhile.”

Jon steels himself. He is proud of how empty his voice is when he asks, “And Magnus?”

“Dead,” Daisy says. She looks sidelong at him, and he keeps his gaze fixed up, toward the ceiling.

Jon has nothing to say to that. So he doesn’t.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to. Daisy doesn’t bother him; she just sits next to him, eyes closed, head tipped peacefully against the wall. He wants to know how she is here, how she came back to him, and where the rest of them are, but he can’t bring himself to be curious about it. Can’t bring himself to be curious about anything at all.

If he could, he would laugh at the irony. Now, five years later and after the end of the world, _now_ his curiosity is gone from him. One last cosmic irony, he supposes. It tastes bitter.

Eventually Jon finds that he can move his neck. For a while he doesn’t, preferring to keep his gaze on the ceiling. It takes several minutes of steeling before he looks to the side, then looks away again as though he’d been burned. No, he’s been burned before; even faster than that.

They’d moved Martin’s body, at least. He can’t decide how he feels about that. He can’t feel much of anything at all.

He can’t tell how much time passes. Time doesn’t pass anymore anyway; it more winds and loops and distorts. He used to measure it in the steady wavebeats of fear, but they’re gone from his consciousness now. For the first time in years, the only eyes on his body are the two sunk deep in his face.

He should panic, he knows. He should be full of fear for consequence. He should probably be dead. He can’t bring himself to care.

Jon closes his eyes and rests.

* * *

The Panopticon trembles.

Daisy sucks in a breath. Jon opens his eyes, drags himself into a seated position. His voice is little more than a croak. “Daisy?”

“Hold on.”

“What?”

She grabs his arm, eyes narrowed. “Hold on to me.”

Now, too late, fear shoots through him. “Daisy, what—?”

“Trust me,” she grits, and crouches next to him, shielding his body with her back. He struggles—he doesn’t want her doing this, he doesn’t _care_ , if he’s in danger she needs to run—but her grip is a vice of iron, and she doesn’t yield.

“Let me go.”

“No,” she grunts, face buried in the back of his head. Something booms, and Jon doesn’t Know but he thinks it’s part of the ceiling, slammed onto this top floor. 

“Daisy, get out of here!”

“Shut it,” she snaps, and the metal beneath them shakes.

“Daisy! Run!”

“Not leaving you!”

He wants to shout. He wants to cry. “Daisy, _please._ _”_

She just holds him tighter. He slumps against her as the world around them shakes apart. Her grip on him stays tight but he goes limp, willing it to be over. For all of it to be over.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, the shaking stops.

A shifting as Daisy looks up. She makes a small pleased noise, then lets him go. “Sims.”

“What?”

“Stop swanning,” she says, and sounds so content that he looks up.

“ _What_ , Daisy—?”

The floor beneath them is smooth. Before them are windows. The sky outside is blue.

Daisy stands, brushing off her knees. Jon stares, open-mouthed, gaping. “Right then,” she says. “Let’s go find the others, yeah?”

“The…the others?”

“Yeah, the others,” she repeats, almost amused, as if Jon were not staring at the simple white cloud puffing above a street full of buildings. Straight-edged, right-cornered buildings, windows of glass and clear-paned. They can’t be any more than two stories up.

“Daisy?” he manages weakly.

“C’mon,” she says, and offers him a hand. “Easier to see than explain.”

* * *

She takes him to the house on Hilltop Road, except, of course, there is no longer a house there. Instead, there is a crater in the ground. Next to the crater, the house crouched behind the door they knock upon is a squat one-storied thing that looks like it contains no more than three rooms. Basira answers the door.

“Hey,” Daisy says, smiling, and Basira wordlessly grabs her and kisses her, there on the doorstep. Jon looks away.

After a moment they break apart. Daisy is more flushed than he’s ever seen her, and Basira is grinning. She leans over her shoulder and shouts, “Jon’s here!”

There are immediate footsteps, almost comically quick. Basira blocks most of the door, allowing Daisy to slip inside, but over her shoulder he can see Georgie, waving frantically at him, Melanie flipping off his general direction, the Admiral thrumming on her shoulder, and—and….

Basira moves out of the way and closes the door. The street is empty, the world set back to rights, and Martin’s arms are so covered in bandages that Jon can’t count his freckles, but his eyes are a soft brown and he’s smiling, wiping at his eyes as he steps out onto the porch.

“Hi,” he says, and Jon stares at him.

He realizes he’s shaking his head. “I—you—”

“Yeah,” Martin says softly. “Me.”

“You _died_.”

“You saved me.”

Jon chokes on a sob. He reaches out, hand shaking, instinctively pinning Martin with eyes that no longer exist, desperately straining to know if this is Martin, if this is _his_ Martin, if this is a trick; but then his hand lands on Martin’s shoulder, still blood-streaked, pressing a faint handprint into the ragged orange wool of his jumper, and it’s real.

“Oh,” he manages, voice gone high-pitched, before burying his face in Martin’s chest and breaking into the most painful sobs of his life.

Martin presses his face into Jon’s hair, holding him up with a familiar easy strength. He murmurs _oh, Jon,_ like it’s _Jon_ that he’d worried for, and every part of him aches as he crumples in Martin’s embrace and wraps his arms so tight around Martin’s waist that he’s sure the fabric of the jumper stretches and he just _does not care_.

“I’m sorry,” he shudders, “Martin, I’m so—I didn’t mean—I’m so _sorry—_ _”_

“None of that,” Martin says softly, his fingers tousling gently into Jon’s hair, brushing it back in small, soothing movements. “You did so well.”

“I lost you.”

“And I found you again,” Martin says gently. Jon presses his face into Martin’s chest so hard that the press of his glasses against his face is painful but Jon revels in it, leans into it, because it means he’s _real_ , that he’s woken up, and he’s not dreaming. “We said we always would.”

Jon bursts into helpless laughter at that. “I suppose we did,” he says shakily. He rests his cheek over Martin’s heart, eyes slipping closed as he listens to the heartbeat there, slow and steady and deep. One of Martin’s hands slides down to curl around the small of his back, the other cupping the point of his jaw. He brushes a kiss to Jon’s forehead.

There, in the distance, is birdsong.

Jon feels himself smile.

* * *

Jon doesn’t let go of Martin’s hand. They’ve appropriated a table from—whoever lived here before Georgie co-opted it from the terror of the Dark that held it captive—and the six of them cluster tight around it. Melanie has one leg hitched over Georgie’s lap, and Basira’s shoulder brushes against Daisy’s, easy and sure.

“How?”

Basira looks to Martin. Martin colors, and shrugs. Jon counts the freckles on his face. There are more than there were before, Jon notices, helplessly happy, and thinks about how much he wants to kiss each one. “I found out what the Web wanted,” he says, as though that were simple. “And then I sort of…made a web of my own.”

Jon laughs, just as helpless, just as enamored, because of course. Of course, at the end, it was that simple. “Brilliant,” he says, and Martin smiles down at him, fond and crinkled, and Jon can’t help but smile back.

* * *

Martin’s flat stands at it had before the changing of the world, save a perpetual low-hanging mist that coats the ground floor. They, as do the rest of the once-residents of that building, decide against returning.

Jon’s flat is decrepit; not from the world’s end but from simple disuse. He burns with faint embarrassment as he unlocks the door with a key that miraculously reformed after melting in the Desolation’s fire, but Martin just looks around and elbows Jon, teasing him about something—the furniture, maybe, or the dust thick along the counter, but Jon doesn’t care. He can’t. He laughs, harder than the comment warrants, and then Martin is laughing too. He leans on Martin, who scoops him up. Jon makes a quick startled noise, latching onto Martin’s shoulder, but Martin is strong—always has been—and seems unbothered as he carries them both to the small sofa that courts the space generously called a living room. He plops them both down, and Jon kisses the underside of his chin, marking a single one off the list of freckles he means to map with his lips over, and over, and over again.

* * *

Even the nonperishables in Jon’s apartment are rotted, and that fact, coupled with the realization that the pain in his stomach is indeed hunger of the regular human variety, sends Jon and Martin tentatively to one of the corner shops that stock frozen meals.

They aren’t the only ones browsing the aisles. People whose scalps are half-burned, people who limp on unfeeling legs, people who look around quick and fearful. Jon and Martin pass through them unnoticed. An old man stumbles on his way from the store, laden with bags too stuffed to carry, and a young woman with bright blue hair and a slow smile takes one for him and walks with him through the automatic doors and out.

Outside, the London rain returns. As Jon and Martin step outside, along the street they see dozens of people do the same. The automatic door stays open as shoppers discard their bags by the door, piled in the corner, stretching out their arms and turning overjoyed faces toward the sky.

The water is clean. Someone bursts into tears. Another handful start laughing. Jon takes Martin’s hand as they cross the street, a small incredulous smile of his own spreading across his face as the buildings of London are washed with a fresh spring rain.

When he looks to the side, a small contented smile to mirror his has slid across Martin’s face. And when Martin catches Jon looking, he squeezes their hands together, then tilts his head back and sticks out his tongue.

Jon laughs, as Martin continues unabashedly catching raindrops on his tongue, before giving into childlike giddy glee and doing the same.

* * *

That weekend, they take a vacation. Daisy’s safehouse in the Scottish Highlands isn’t quite large enough for six, but they bring sleeping bags and camper beds and an overwhelming amount of good humor, and somehow they all fit. The firehouse roars for hours, and only dwindles in the late hours of the morning. Daisy and Basira tuck into the single bed that Jon and Martin had once claimed as their own, and Melanie and Georgie set up sleeping bags outside; Melanie can’t seem to get enough of hearing the world, returned to its rightful place, ensconced as happily in a choir of crickets and owl-hoots as in blankets and warmth.

Martin holds a still-warm mug of tea in his hands, eyes glinting with mirth as he and Jon talk about nothing at all. Apparently, Jon learns, he wants to start a garden. Jon concedes on the condition that they get a cat. Martin asks what they’d name her, and Jon says, decisive, “The Corporal.”

Martin snorts. “A rank below the Admiral, hm?”

“Yes.”

A pause. Martin leans back. In the distance, a cow lows, and Jon finds himself smiling again. Long-disused muscles in his face ache from all the smiling he’s doing, and he curls closer to Martin, anchored by the warmth of his side. “I’m calling her Cooper.”

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s a nickname, Jon.”

“It’s disrespectful!”

“You can’t stop me!”

Jon splutters and Martin laughs, shoulders shaking. Jon keeps up his pretense of indignation, just because he can, because he _wants_ to, because Martin’s laughter is his favorite song in the world. He grumbles and grumps his way onto Martin’s lap and waits as his laughter subsides.

“Hello,” Martin says, unbearably fond, and Jon mumbles something unintelligible at him before pressing a kiss to his jawbone. He stills. “Jon?”

“Hush,” Jon says, kissing along his cheek, in a pattern he sees when he presses against his eyelids.

“Jon?” Martin sounds confused now, hands settling against Jon’s waist. “What are you doing?”

Jon hums, making his way around to Martin’s nose, before leaning back and saying, serious as anything, “Kissing your freckles.”

Martin looks back at him. Then he snorts, pushing at Jon’s cheek. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re lovely,” Jon says, catching Martin’s hand, and Martin stares at him. Even in the dim light of the embers, glinting from their cradle of wood, he colors visibly.

“Jon….”

Jon smiles. “I know.”

Martin brings a hand up, brushing the hair from Jon’s face, eyes traveling soft along Jon’s face as he does. “When I woke up….”

He trails off. Jon tilts his head, and Martin cups his cheek, swallowing. He opens his mouth, jaw working, and Jon says, quiet, “You don’t have to.”

Martin shakes his head, so Jon waits.

“I thought you’d died,” Martin murmurs. His hand slips from Jon’s cheek, curling empty in his lap. “It was awful.”

Jon keeps quiet, sympathetic. He knows the feeling well.

“You had wings,” Martin says, “did you know?” His lips quirk in a hollow smile, and Jon hurts for it, that even still he smiles to reassure Jon even as he aches. Martin reaches over his shoulder and pats the top of his shoulderblades. “Two of them. Full of eyes. They were closed.”

“My eyes?”

“Yeah,” Martin says, folding his hands together. They wring, anxious. “All of them. That’s what…that’s why I thought you’d….”

Jon winces. “I’m sorry.”

Martin brushes the comment away. “You were all _eyes,_ ” he says instead, soft and haunted. “And when I—when I called your name, you didn’t…not a single eye looked at me, Jon. That had never happened before, when I tried to wake you up.” He laughs, quiet and empty. “I tried so many times.”

He falls silent, hands fallen still. Outside, a nature renewed sings its gentle chorus: creatures of the night, chirping and cooing and thrumming and lowing, all a distant murmur, a blanket. A comfort.

Jon takes Martin’s hands in his own. He laces their fingers together, carefully, and lifts one pair of their interlaced hands, and brushes a kiss to the starburst of freckles running along his forearm, ending on the back of his palm.

“Do you remember it?” he asks, not sure whether he wants the answer. For once, he doesn’t have to mind the compulsion that threaded so easily through his voice, and the low resonance of his tone is entirely his own making. “When Magnus….”

“Took over? No.”

“Good,” Jon says, grateful. What he’d done to Magnus— “Good.”

Martin huffs a little laugh. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Jon says, purposefully too quick.

“Jon.”

_“Martin.”_

Martin swats at him with his free hand, and Jon ducks out of the way, his sharp exhale rounded with mirth. “Whatever you did, it must have been a lot.”

“A lot. Yes, that’s…one way to put it.”

Martin doesn’t say anything to that, just watches him quietly. He reaches out, then, and takes Jon’s other hand; winds their fingers together, just as deliberate, just as tender. “I love you, you know,” he says, voice soft.

Jon looks at him. In the low lighting of the ember-bed keeping them warm, Martin’s hair—which never quite recovered its full hue after the Lonely—glints with burnished golds, the fire highlighting and haloing his head. His eyes are soft, and open, and sure.

“Of course I do,” Jon murmurs. “Martin Blackwood. I am in love with you.”

He says it, quiet and even, and watches with pleasure as Martin’s expression slides oddly along his face, the truth of Jon’s words warring with Martin’s doubt. His fight with the Lonely had not ended with the righting of the world.

Jon raises their interlocked hands, wraps his around to cup the back of Martin’s, brings it to his mouth. Presses a kiss, feather-light, to the heel of his palm. “I love you,” Jon says again, because he can, because it makes Martin smile, faint and helpless; because every time he says it, Martin believes him a little more.

He laces their fingers back and leans forward, chin raised, and Martin bows his head obligingly. Jon moves across his forehead, trailing kisses along the wrinkles there, eyes slipping closed; if he misses one, well, he’ll get it the next time around.

“Jon,” Martin says, half-laughing, unbearably fond, and Jon leans back. “You ridiculous man.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“I love you.”

“I know,” Jon says, warm. “I love you too.”

Martin hesitates. Jon keeps his gaze, steady, patient.

“I know,” Martin murmurs. “I do.”

Jon smiles. He shifts back around to tuck himself against Martin’s side, and yelps quietly when Martin picks him up, then sets them on the couch and tugs them both sideways, lying face-to-face. Martin drapes Daisy’s old tartan quilt over them, adjusting it carefully over Jon’s shoulders, and lies still, obliging, as Jon does the same.

Jon closes his eyes, presses a kiss to the freckle just between Martin’s eyebrows, feeling them scrunch beneath his lips. There are more, he sees, on the image of Martin he holds in his mind; wound around his eyebrow and drifting toward his temple, but those, Jon thinks, he can leave a little while.

After all, they have all the time in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> jonny sims don't tear out my heart with the s5 finale challenge
> 
> unrealistic. i know. join me on [tumblr](http://inkedinserendipity.tumblr.com) for more of the Good Shit


End file.
